Documentum xPlore – Admin Interface Review

We recently installed xPlore 1.0 SP1 in our environment in order to support a client installation, and we thought we’d share our thoughts on the Documentum xPlore Administrator application.

From what we’ve seen so far, the xPlore Administrator application is a really nice administrative interface that’s clean, easy to use, and presents relevant data as well as tools for running test searches and reports.  When you log in to the application, an overview screen is displayed with navigation on the left and an overview section on the right.  Clicking on the System Overview node in the nav pane gives you a quick over view of your system.  You can easily see if any of the services are down or if there are any problems:

One quick note – the “BETA” in our server name refers to the server itself.  The software deployed is xPlore 1.0 SP1, not the beta release or the controlled release.

The instances section in the nav bar give you quick access to all your xPlore instances and provides data about indexing an searches.  The following screenshot shows an overview of our indexing service.  You can quickly see the number of documents indexed, documents in the queue, and indexing performance metrics.

The search Service section provides similar data, but for searches rather than indexing:

The Diagnostic and Troubleshooting section contains a number of helpful tools.  The Test Search feature is a welcome addition, and will surely get a lot of use.  The interface lets you simply enter a search string and will display the associated XQuery as well as the search results:

The reports section will also be very useful for administrators.  The out of the box product comes with a number of built in reports:

While we haven’t seen a way to create custom reports, you can setup criteria on one of the existing reports, and then click the “Save As >>” button in order to save it for future use.

Overall, we really like the new xPlore admin interface.  It is certainly a great upgrade over what was available with FAST.  Please feel free to post your comments about xPlore Administrator or xPlore in general below.